Tonight’s Lost Final Season Premiere Bootlegs Online; Fans Turn Away

Bootleg copies of the opening scene of tonight’s final-season premiere of Lost — and for a while even the entire episode — were leaked online days before the cult hit returned to the air after a months-long hiatus. But that sort of thing isn’t news anymore. What’s news is that fans of the eccentric drama, an acquired taste about plane-wrecked time travelers, good and evil, and science — perhaps even religion — run amuck, seemed to stay away in droves in favor of the legal, scheduled airing.

The Hollywood Reporter saysthat when the opening scene first showed up on one social network site users voted to bury it. Then, when the entire episode escaped from a fan screening in Hawaii and surfaced as a shaky, hand-held video on YouTube, it got only a few hundred hits. I couldn’t find it at all — presumably ABC is winning the takedown arms race — but honestly I didn’t try too hard since I don’t want to be tempted to find out what happened when that nuke went off at the end of season five. I mean, what happened if, and when, that nuke when off.

This even though there are dozens of fan sites dedicated to Lost, where every word, gesture and pixel of the series is scrutinized like the scriptures many suspect will play a role in the explanation of the Lost universe, which one hopes begins in earnest tonight in the first of the 18 series-ending episodes of season six.

Or, maybe it’s because fan interest in the show is so high that the value of a shared experience — in high definition — trumps getting a head start on the water cooler conversation that will begin during the show on IMs, Twitter and e-mails and, oh yeah, in-person among those people who actually watch the show physically together in the same room. “Are people so impatient that they would rather watch a cell phone camera version of the ‘Lost’ premiere than wait one day?” THR quoted one fan as saying on Twitter.

Maybe this is just about avoiding spoilers or crappy video. But I have a hunch there is more to it. The phenomenon of postponing joy in the era of Bit Torrent, general revile for DRM, and TiVo liberation may reveal a truth in the rough: People want what they want, but it isn’t necessarily the knee-jerk assumption of some content owner that the motive to bypass legal channels is merely to steal. Maybe consumers are just fine paying a fair amount for a good experience, and just hate stupid restrictions and monopoly pricing.